By Natasha Reid
A 49-year-old woman with no criminal record has been jailed for four years for storing more than €1.5 million worth of cannabis in her Dublin home.
Oana Onofrei, who will turn 50 next week, was finding it hard to pay the rent on her Lucan house when she agreed to sublet a room to men ‘for weed’.
Onofrei, with an address at St Edmunds Grove in Lucan, who was before Dublin Circuit Criminal Court today, pleaded guilty to possession of the drugs for sale or supply at her home there on November 13, 2025.
The court heard that the Gardai searched her home after receiving information and observing a delivery there. A total of €1,556,000 worth of cannabis was found.
Onofrei told detectives that she had lost a tenant the previous Christmas and she had struggled to pay her rent. She then met a number of men in a local park, who offered her €1,000 a month for the room.
She said that she ‘knew it was for weed’ and that they just needed a room to store and sort it, and she provided them with a key.
As well as getting €1,000 a month for the room, sometimes they’d leave money on bags and text her to deliver them. She had been asked to download the Signal App, and this was used to give her instructions.
She said that the first deliveries were small but that this was larger. There was €50 left on top of this bag.
The defendant, who had no previous convictions, said that she was very sorry and would rather kill herself than get involved again. She said it was to help her family to live.
Diana Stuart SC, defending, noted that her client was not on the garda radar before this and did not fit the profile of the person they expected to meet that day. She’d always worked full-time, and came from a good family, who had now effectively disowned her.
Counsel said that her client had been working in Tesco Home Deliveries and renting a home in Lucan, a very affluent part of Dublin, but that her rent was extremely high.
She had been finding life very difficult and ended up smoking cannabis, which was when she agreed to keep ‘this enormous amount of cannabis in the house’. She had no understanding of how grave her offence was, she added.
“She now realises she can’t afford to live in this property,” she said.
Judge Martin Nolan accepted that she had made little or no profit, having heard that she never had the money to take up her €5,000 bail. However, he said she was a reasonably vital cog in their operations.
“I’ve come to the view that she’s unlikely to reoffend,” he said.
Judge Nolan said that the headline sentence for this offence would ordinarily be eight years but, given mitigation, he would cut it in two.
He sentenced her to four years in prison, and backdated it to November when she went into custody.